Edward Victor Appleton

Edward Victor Appleton graduated from Cambridge, served as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers during the First World War, and returned from the Western Front with a captured German thermionic valve. By 1924 he was Wheatstone Professor at King's College London, unravelling how radio waves were created, propagated, and reflected by the upper atmosphere. He returned to Cambridge in 1936 as Jacksonian Professor and became acting director of the Cavendish Laboratory after Ernest Rutherford died that October. In 1939 he became Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, marshalling Britain's scientific knowledge for the war effort and overseeing radar development - an outgrowth of his ionosphere work. He also ran Tube Alloys, the British nuclear weapons project, until it merged into the Manhattan Project in 1943. The Nobel came in 1947. He spent his final seventeen years as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, overseeing its growth and the controversial redevelopment of George Square.